


A Wild Life:  The True Story of Curt Wild (Introduction Only)

by PyrrhaIphis



Series: Catching up to the present [3]
Category: Velvet Goldmine
Genre: M/M, Reminiscing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-04-24
Packaged: 2018-10-23 19:13:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10725474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PyrrhaIphis/pseuds/PyrrhaIphis
Summary: After more than a decade spent working on it, Arthur has written the ultimate biography of the man he loves.  In the Introduction, he explains why.(Does not require knowledge of what happened in the previous two parts of the series.)





	A Wild Life:  The True Story of Curt Wild (Introduction Only)

            Writing a biography—or any book at all, truth be told—should always be a labour of love.  In this case, it is admittedly more love than labour, but it is still the product of many years’ hard work.

            I first realised this biography was needed many years ago.  We were out shopping for books when our daughter Janis—then eight or nine years old—came over to Curt with a large photo book in her hands.  She turned its open pages to face him and asked “What is that man doing to your guitar, Papa?”

            I am sure few people familiar with Curt’s career need more than that to know what the photograph depicted.  (Those who _do_ need more will be able to see it reproduced in the colour photo pages towards the centre of this book.)  While my history with that image is necessarily less intimate than Curt’s, it has always been a powerful image to me, and played a direct role in my precipitous departure from my family home in Manchester.  At that time, it seemed to me the most sensual image I had ever seen.  So many years later, in a London bookshop, being held up by my young daughter’s innocent hands, it was painfully humiliating and little else.

            While I was struggling with the awkward reality that our little girl had just inadvertently discovered a risqué photo of one of her fathers with an earlier boyfriend—one who had a wife at the time, at that!—Curt saw something else entirely.  He took the book from Janis’s hands, and flipped through it, his face growing more and more irate until he slammed the thing shut with all too much force.  “That’s the only fucking picture of me in the entire damned book!” he shouted.  Alas, Curt has never really mastered his own personal volume control.

            I took the book from him and had a look myself, in the hopes that a few pages had been stuck together or that he had otherwise missed them in his haste, but he had been quite correct:  it was indeed the only photograph of him in the book.  Said book was a cheap, hack-written piece of the sort seemingly manufactured for the exclusive purpose of being put straight into the ‘clearance’ racks at book shops; this particular one was a ‘history’ of popular music of the 1970s.

            The text accompanying the photo was entirely dismissive of Curt’s career.  I should have written down what it said at the time—or asked Curt to swallow his pride and allow me to buy the thing—but I didn’t, so I can only paraphrase for you what it said, as follows:  “Curt Wild (b. 1947) was an American singer whose music bridged the gap between the 1960s and the 1980s, carrying the influence of the Doors and Jimi Hendrix through the low period of American music that was the early 1970s.  Better known for his unprofessional behaviour than for his music, Wild never admitted to being homosexual, and yet attained his most lasting fame as the paramour of Brian Slade.  A drug addict cursed with a foul temper, Wild’s behaviour was so animalistic that fans concluded he had been raised by wolves.”

            You may think I’m exaggerating, but if anything I am underselling the truth.  Among much ranting and raving, Curt swore repeatedly that he was going to sue the publisher.  (Naturally, that never happened.)  On top of the grotesque disservice to his great musical talent, there was the fact that the text was phrased to suggest that Curt had long since passed on, not to mention the typical confusion regarding bisexuality and homosexuality.

            Of course, once the storm had passed, Curt was ready to laugh it off as irrelevant.  Said that history would vindicate him, so it didn’t matter what a few idiots might believe.  I wasn’t ready to agree with that, however, and suggested that the world needed a proper account of his life, to ensure history had access to the truth.  It took some convincing to make Curt agree with me:  he said that he doesn’t care what other people think of him, so why should we bother correcting them?  I could only tell him that I felt sorry for the rest of the world, because they don’t get to see what a wonderful man he really is.  Even then, it still took considerable argument to get him to agree to it.

            I began the process of writing it immediately, gathering information and writing up draft after draft.  The question remained, of course, where to have it end, and this continued to be the subject of some debate for at least ten years.  Eventually I caught up to what was then the present, and the decision had to be made, whether to publish right away, or wait for “the right moment.”  We decided—after a lengthy discussion not only between ourselves, but with our children and closest friends—that it might best if the book was released posthumously, so it would truly cover Curt’s _entire_ life.   In the meantime, I would add chapters every few years to describe the additional time that was passing, keeping it up to date.  (Never an easy task, as Curt detests sitting still, and is always getting involved with something new.)

            But the more time that passed, the more time I had to think about it, the more I knew that was unacceptable.  No, not unacceptable:  impossible.  How would I be able to add a final chapter to the manuscript dealing with the loss of the man I love?  Even as a nebulous idea sometime in the future, I don’t like to write the words.  How could I have written them after living through that loss?  (I know, with the rational part of my brain, that it is only a matter of time.  After all, I am ten years younger than he is, and he’s had a hard life.)  The obvious alternative seemed to be to set the manuscript aside somewhere and ask our children to write a final chapter after we were both gone.  But could we really have done that?  It seemed heartless, and yet more pleasant than the former alternative.

            Meanwhile, time continued apace, and the world continued to change.  The world had all but forgotten Curt and I existed when the announcement suddenly went out that we had gotten married after being together for more than thirty years.  The announcement didn’t get much attention on the Internet—it had rather stiff competition, after all—but what little it got, as far as I could tell, was mild confusion about why we had waited several years after Parliament legalised same-sex marriage.  Then the paperwork finished going through, and Curt promptly—and very loudly—relinquished his American citizenship in order to protest a particularly egregious election.  That left the world at large floundering for an explanation, even as our friends all sent texts and e-mails along the lines of “You’re so predictable.”

            That made me realise that the perfect time had come to polish up and publish this biography.  It is my hope that when people read it, they will finally get to know the _real_ Curt Wild.  Not just the larger-than-life rock and roll star (with the accompanying sex, drugs and fits of temperament for which Curt has become somewhat infamous), but also the gentle soul who preferred to risk his life in an automobile accident than to hit a dog with his car, the tender lover, and the caring father who is always happy to spend hours sitting on the floor in front of the telly playing video games with his children (or grandchildren) and who also loved to help our daughter pick out the prettiest outfits for her dolls.  Only with all these parts of his life assembled into the whole can you see the real man who has made my life such a joy over all these years.

            In some respects, the book you are about to read is more of an autobiography than a regular biography.  Not only because of the large role I play in the events described herein, but also because most of the earlier chapters—the incidents before we met—are based almost exclusively on Curt’s own memories, as related to me over the years.  But Curt isn’t always the most reliable narrator, so I have also called upon less biased sources where necessary (and possible).

            Between drugs and AIDS, a great many of Curt’s former friends and colleagues from the early ‘70s are now gone.  I hope that I have done these absent friends proper justice in my portrayal of them.  In case my account fell flat, I have taken the liberty of adding a list of excellent biographies of Curt’s colleagues from the ‘70s—those who are still with us as well as those who have been lost—at the end of the book.


End file.
